Arkansas legislators in their recent special session declined to use the state’s budget surplus to increase teacher salaries, but some indicated interest in doing so next year. Let’s hope they follow through.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson had wanted lawmakers to increase the minimum starting teacher salary from $36,000 to $42,000 while ensuring each teacher received at least a $4,000 raise. He did that after Mississippi raised its minimum salary to $41,500.
Lawmakers were willing to cut taxes, but he couldn’t get the teacher pay raise through the House and Senate Education Committees. Those lawmakers are engaged in an adequacy study, which is a year-long process where they consider how much money each school district will receive as part of a funding matrix.
The matrix adds up everything a typical school district might need and provides it in a lump sum, but districts don’t have to match those amounts for specific expenditures. A district wanting to pay teachers more can do so if it has the money available.
The process has roots in the Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee school funding case. That case drug the state through 15 years of exhausting legal maneuverings that no one wants to repeat. The study should be finished soon, and then the Legislature will vote on changes when it meets starting in January. Meanwhile, lawmakers are pressuring school districts to pay teachers bonuses now using federal COVID funds.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that teachers are not glorified babysitters. They are skilled professionals with one of society’s most important jobs.
Consider what happened in March 2020, when the governor shut down schools for the rest of the semester. Literally within days, teachers went from classroom instructors to remote educators, whether their students had broadband internet access or not. I never would have imagined that 34,000 government employees could turn on a dime, but they did.
Unlike many states, Arkansas schools returned to classes that fall, although many students did not. The arrangement meant teachers were pulling double duty, instructing some students in person and others online.
They were doing this in the middle of a pandemic where their jobs required them to spend their days in close contact with lots of young people. There was a small number of Arkansas teachers who died of COVID. Meanwhile, teachers have become the direct and indirect targets of an ugly culture war they did not start. And there’s the fear that their school could become the rare but real victim of a mass shooter.
I have not seen a survey of Arkansas teachers, but a recent one by the Texas State Teachers Association found that 70% were seriously considering leaving the profession, compared to 53% who said the same in 2018. Ninety-four percent said their job stress had increased during the pandemic. Seventy percent said parental support had decreased during the pandemic, while 85% said they didn’t believe state leaders and legislators have a positive opinion of them.
Eighty-two percent said they experienced increased financial pressures during the pandemic, and 41% took extra jobs during the school year while 55% had summer jobs. They reported spending an average of $846 a year out of their own pockets for classroom supplies. Eighty-seven percent said they would like to quit moonlighting but would need a pay raise of roughly $12,000.
What to make of that? On the one hand, dissatisfied people are more likely to respond to almost any survey. Plus, teaching is hardly the only profession where many are considering quitting. We are, after all, in the middle of what’s being called “The Great Resignation.”
But we do have this hard data: In Arkansas, 24% of the state’s teachers left public school employment in 2021, and the percentages were similar in previous years.
Teachers have a great retirement plan, as this son of two long-retired teachers can attest. But a retirement plan doesn’t pay the monthly bills.
In Fayetteville, starting teachers will be making $50,000 next year, while Springdale teachers will be making $50,282, the state’s highest amount. Those salaries might attract and retain the professionals tasked with preparing almost 500,000 students each year for the workforce and to be good citizens.
But statewide, we’re nowhere near that. Currently, 145 of the state’s 261 school districts start teachers at that $36,000 minimum salary.
That’s $5,500 less than it will be in Mississippi. That difference won’t change for one year, but it shouldn’t last two.
